The Mars Room - Softcover

Kushner, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982100753 ISBN 13: 9781982100759

Publisher: Scribner Book Company, 2018

Synopsis

From twice National Book Award-nominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called "the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year" (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.

It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner's work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction "succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."

"Kushner is going to be one we turn to for our serious pleasures and for the insight and wisdom we'll be needing in hard times to come. She is a novelist of the very first order." --Robert Stone

"Kushner is a young master. I honestly don't know how she is able to know so much and convey all of this in such a completely entertaining and mesmerizing way." --George Saunders

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013. Her first novel, Telex from Cuba was also a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Los Angeles.

Review

“Like Denis Johnson in ‘Jesus’ Son,’ Kushner is on the lookout for bent moments of comic grace...The Mars Room is a major novel.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“The Mars Room affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists...her stories slink in the margins, but they have the feel of something iconic.”—Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

“Kushner is a woman with the chops, ambition and killer instinct to rub shoulders with all those big, swinging male egos who routinely get worshipped as geniuses.”—John Powers, Fresh Air

“[A] tough, prismatic and quite gripping novel...wholly authentic...profound...surprisingly luminous.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"A searing, tragic look at life in the prison-industrial complex, covering poverty, sex work, mass incarceration, education, trauma, suffering, love, and redemption. Somehow, Kushner's rapid-fire, imaginative prose makes it seems effortless.”—Vogue

“Kushner is a masterful world-creator, and her accomplishment here is unparalleled.”—Nylon

“Kushner’s writing and thinking are always invigorating, urgent, and painterly precise.”—Vulture

“Stunning... a gorgeously written depiction of survival and the absurd and violent facets of life in prison.” —Buzzfeed

 “Reading The Mars Room is a profoundly affecting experience, very nearly overwhelming, and yet it absolutely must be read. Kushner’s first two novels (Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers) were National Book Award finalists. It would be baffling if The Mars Room does not win this year’s.” —Cory Oldweiler, amNewYork

“[A] stunning new book... Kushner deploys the masterful storytelling she’s known for...an unmistakable voice. “—Town and Country

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1982100753
• ISBN 13: 9781982100759
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320